Heritage

of the Publishers and the Published of Catalonia

Catalonia's bibliographic and document output is rich and diverse, with authors from all eras and fields supported by a publishing industry which attests to Catalan culture and is a crucial part in cultural dissemination and consumption.
The Biblioteca de Catalunya and other Catalan institutions conserve collections and personal archives of the authors and publishing collections that contribute to constructing both our history and our present. It is important to spread awareness of these works and to make them easy to locate and study.
Among the documents conserved at the BC, should be remarked the
Biblioteca Bergnes de las Casas,
specialized in the world of books and publishing.
The Portal of the Heritage of Publishers and the Published:

Promotes the preservation and discovery of our publishing heritage.

Provides a single point of access to the collections and archives of publishers and authors.

Contributes to the internationalisation of Catalonia’s heritage and culture through its cultural industries.

Spotlights the personal collections of authors and publishers through their links.

Guarantees that historical publications are available for future publications.

From the very start, this initiative has benefited from the involvement and disinterested advice of Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, a journalist and writer who is an expert in the book sector and reading, whom we particularly wish to thank for his support.

Knowing the history of a country means knowing about the events, the culture, the language… The culture is a sum of creation, the institutions and the cultural industries. In the world of books, publishers have played and continue to play an essential role. Making their activity visible on the Internet by locating their archives and those of the authors they publish is a unique way to spotlight the vitality of Catalan culture.

The cultural history of a country is somehow the history of its publishing industry. French culture cannot be understood without the "Encyclopédie", just as we cannot understand Catalan culture from the 19th and 20th centuries without knowing the work of Montaner y Simón or Edicions 62. This is why it is so important to celebrate the Biblioteca de Catalunya’s project aimed at compiling our publishing heritage.

Lluís AgustíDirector of the Escola de LlibreriaFaculty of Library Science and Documentation Universitat de Barcelona

One of the Biblioteca de Catalunya’s avenues of work is to promote the recovery and conservation of personal collections. We at the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes (Institution of Catalan Letters) contribute towards this goal and have undertaken a joint programme to preserve our literary heritage. With this portal, the Library is taking yet another step in sharing the collections that exist and their location, because it is as important to preserve the collections as it is to encourage them to be used, studied and disseminated.

Barcelona, publishing capital

The world of Catalan books has caused an international impact over the centuries

Sergio Vila-Sanjuán

Barcelona is one of the cities in the world that has one of the longest and most continuous publishing histories. From the invention of the printing press until today, it has spent more than five centuries producing volumes for an extraordinarily wide range of readers. This uninterrupted effort defines the capital of Catalonia, which has been and continues to be the publishing capital of the Spanish-speaking world.
How did Barcelona become the key reference in the international cultural industry?
Back in the Middle Ages, the city had what we could consider a complete book ecosystem which included authors, disseminators (copyists, printers, publishers), booksellers, librarians and of course normal readers as well as bibliophiles. This concentration defines an entire way of experiencing culture, and its remnants are one of the main hallmarks of Barcelona residents. This has been noticed by outside observers such as Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century and Mario Vargas Llosa in the 20th century, when specifically defining Barcelona in terms of its relationship with books.

Presentació

Catalonia's bibliographic and document output is rich and diverse, with authors from all eras and fields supported by a publishing industry which attests to Catalan culture and is a crucial part in cultural dissemination and consumption.
The Biblioteca de Catalunya and other Catalan institutions conserve collections and personal archives of the authors and publishing collections that contribute to constructing both our history and our present. It is important to spread awareness of these works and to make them easy to locate and study.
The Portal of the Heritage of Publishers and the Published:

Promotes the preservation and discovery of our publishing heritage.

Provides a single point of access to the collections and archives of publishers and authors.

Contributes to the internationalisation of Catalonia’s heritage and culture through its cultural industries.

Spotlights the personal collections of authors and publishers through their links.

Guarantees that historical publications are available for future publications.

From the very start, this initiative has benefited from the involvement and disinterested advice of Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, a journalist and writer who is an expert in the book sector and reading, whom we particularly wish to thank for his support.

Eugènia SerraDirectorBiblioteca de Catalunya

Barcelona, publishing capital

The world of Catalan books has caused an international impact over the centuries

Sergio Vila-Sanjuán

Barcelona is one of the cities in the world that has one of the longest and most continuous publishing histories. From the invention of the printing press until today, it has spent more than five centuries producing volumes for an extraordinarily wide range of readers. This uninterrupted effort defines the capital of Catalonia, which has been and continues to be the publishing capital of the Spanish-speaking world.
How did Barcelona become the key reference in the international cultural industry?
Back in the Middle Ages, the city had what we could consider a complete book ecosystem which included authors, disseminators (copyists, printers, publishers), booksellers, librarians and of course normal readers as well as bibliophiles. This concentration defines an entire way of experiencing culture, and its remnants are one of the main hallmarks of Barcelona residents. This has been noticed by outside observers such as Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century and Mario Vargas Llosa in the 20th century, when specifically defining Barcelona in terms of its relationship with books.

The medieval forge

The pervasiveness of books dates back to at least the 11th century. From that period, there is proof that copies of religious and legal books were in circulation. The historian J. E. Ruiz-Domènec recalls that the Counts of Barcelona, who were also the Kings of Aragon after the 12th century, shared a fondness for culture via books. Thus, Alphonse the Troubadour received from the cathedral dean Ramon de Caldes a veritable monument, the Liber Feudorum Maior, which exhaustively documents the relations between the house of the counts and the Catalan nobility over the course of a century. This same house is the one that promoted the Jocs Florals in what is today known as the Saló de Cent in the Town Hall, breathing life into poetry in the Gothic heart of the city.
The Kings of Aragon welcomed writers like Bernat Metge, the author of Lo somni. Meantime, figures near the court, such as the aristocrat Bernat Tous and the archivist Pere Miquel Car, created magnificent libraries that were the envy of their acquaintances, and they can be considered fully-fledged bibliophiles.
Joan Batista Batlle explains that in the Middle Ages, the booksellers of Barcelona were in charge of supplying the clergy, jurists and wealthy merchants with copies of the books of each estate. Their workers were copyists, illuminators of letters (initial letters) and woodcarvers. The foundation of their business was books of the lives of saints and psalters, as well as engraved prints and all sorts of popular books. The profession required a practitioner to be cultivated and multifaceted: they had to know Latin, have notions of palaeography and have good handwriting to copy the manuscripts commissioned to them. When the city councillors handed down ordinances for the booksellers in 1445, it was the first time that the importance of the guild was recognised on the Iberian Peninsula. One street near the mediaeval heart of the city was later named Llibreteria (Bookseller).
In this world in which the written letter was cultivated, it should come as no surprise that just a few years after Gutenberg launched his universal invention, German artisans like Enric Botel and Paul of Konstanz moved to Barcelona and organised the first printing studios to operate regularly in Spain. After the 1480s, a succession of publications in Latin, Catalan and Spanish emerged from Barcelona’s presses. The scholar Pere Bohigas cites a Catalan translation of Lo càrcer d’Amor, from 1493 printed by Rosembach; Pere Tomich’s Histories i conquestes, (1534); and Antiquiores barchinonsium leges quas vulgus usaticos appellat, from 1544, one of the most beautiful books from the period.
It was also a period in which the activities of booksellers, publishers and master printers are often confused, as can be deduced from a seminal study Documentos para la historia de la imprenta y librería en Barcelona(1474-1553), published in 1955 by two prominent experts on the world of books, Josep Maria Madurell and Jordi Rubió. This compilation includes everything from inventories of books left in inheritances by the nobles of the period to publishing licenses, such as the licence to work granted by the Emperor Charles I in one of his sojourns in Barcelona to a publisher from Cologne, along with economic negotiations such as the one engaged in by the town hall of the cathedral of Tortosa and the printer Rosenbach regarding the payment of some missals.
A few dozen kilometres from the city, the press of the Monastery of Montserrat issued its first publication in 1499, a Liber meditationum vitae domini. Encara que amb successives interrupcions en la seva etapa, l’editorial de l’Abadia continua avui en actiu, la qual cosa la converteix en el segell degà d’Europa.

Don Quixote in the workshop

There is one key literary episode that illustrates Barcelona’s zeal for publishing. In the early 17th century, when Cervantes brought Don Quixote to Barcelona in the final chapters of the second part of his novel, he has him enter a press, which was presumably inspired by the one owned by Sebastià de Cormellas, where he held weighty conservations with the printer and with an Italian author. Cervantes thus painted the capital of Catalonia as a city of books in the international literary imagination – since Don Quixote quickly became a European bestseller, a true signal of to what extent printing had taken root here.
In Catalonia in the 17th and 18th centuries, the output of religious books, textbooks, professional treatises and literary works remained steady. Latin was on the wane, and Spanish was on the rise: many classics for the rest of Spain were published in Barcelona. Catalan primarily remained through educational works, leaflets and cordel booklets. To learn more about this period and in general all of these topics, Manuel Llanas'
Història de l’edició a Catalunya is a must-read.
Printing workshops, associated with booksellers, often remained in the same family, yielding the printing dynasties of the Martí, Surià and Piferrer families. The visually most arresting work of the 18th century from Catalonia,
La máscara realcommissioned by the Barcelona guilds to celebrate the arrival of King Charles III to the city in 1759 was printed in the workshops of the Piferrer family; this book describes the festivities with which he was complimented.
Based on a series of invoices which still survive, the historian A. Duran i Sanpere was able to reconstruct how the Piferrers’ business worked. This was their "cabotage" business, with expeditions to different cities around the Mediterranean coast, from Alicante to Seville. The maritime book trade took place with the use of small boats called
llaüts, bergantins, balandras and other vessels. They were manned by captains from Palamós, Valencia, San Feliu, Malgrat, Mallorca, Denia or Barcelona. "The books," adds Duran, "were wrapped in bundles, bales or packages and stored in wooden boxes if they were bound."
The Piferrer family distributed their own books, along with those published by other printers, such as Altés or Gerard Nadal. The historian notes that most of them were devout works (
Despertar del alma, Diferencia entre lo temporal y lo eterno, la Vida devota de Sant Francesc de Sales
but they also included history books, educational books (such as
Última despedida de la Mariscala a sus hijos
by the Marquis of Caracciolo, major bestsellers of their period) and literary works, such as Quevedo's Sueños.
During this century, cultural institutions revolving around the world of books flourished in Barcelona, such as the Royal Academy of Belles-Lettres, with its scholarly meetings and historicist publications.

Modernisation

In the early 19th century, the flat printing machine allowed books to be printed more quickly, making them cheaper to produce. According to all witnesses, Antoni Bergnes de las Casas was the first modern publisher in Catalonia with works like the imposing 10-volume
Diccionario geogràfico universal
published between 1830 and 1834. Bergnes was also the editor-in-chief of magazines like "El Vapor", where Aribau published his poem "La pàtria" (1833), widely regarded as the launching point of the Renaixença.
Throughout the entire century, numerous figures from the world of books swayed between the publishing universe that focused zealously on the Spanish-language market while they simultaneously supported or advocated for recognition of literature in Catalan, which captured the energies of much of the 'intelligentsia' of Catalonia. The solidity, technology and resources of the Spanish-language publishing industry made it easier to launch publications in Catalan.
One of Bergnes' contemporaries was Joaquín Verdaguer, whose famous illustrated 12-volume series, Recuerdos y bellezas de España, with plates illustrated by F. J. Parcerissa, was available in bookshops. Narciso Ramírez and Francisco Oliva were also among the most illustrious publishers of the era, and some of them doubled as booksellers as well.
In the waning decades of the century, strong, powerful publishing houses were consolidated which had their own warehouses and printing presses. They signalled the shift from romantic to industrial publishing. Part of their success came from the economic upswing of the Catalan bourgeoisie and their entrepreneurial spirit, which spurred them to adopt the latest technical advances. Working in their favour was quick access to paper, as Catalonia was the leading paper manufacturer in Spain with factories such as Guarro in Gelida.
These large publishers bear names that would become mythical, such as Montaner y Simón, Salvat, Heinrich and Espasa. Their owners and managers often travelled around Europe to familiarise themselves with new printing systems, add translations to their catalogues and participate in international guild gatherings in Paris, Brussels, London or Leipzig. There they shared with their colleagues their concern over the different intellectual property laws.
During this period, Barcelona positioned itself as a publishing leader in the Spanish-speaking world based on its constant exports to the Americas and the creation of offices and branches in different South American countries, as the French Hispanist Phillipe Castellano has studied in depth.
During the second half of the 19th century, numerous publishing houses systematically published in Catalan, which received a new stimulus as a language of culture after three centuries. The literary Renaixença had its practical correlate in imprints like L'Avenç and La il·lustració Catalana, which were associated with magazines of the same name.
In 1897, Josep Lluís Pellicer and Eudald Canibell created the Catalan Institute of Book Arts with the twofold goal of lobbying in favour of the publishing industry and training professionals in techniques like photoengraving, stereotypty and composition.
Those were years with an intense literary life in which contests like the Jocs Florals and institutions like the Ateneu gathered together the writers of the day and allowed their contacts and relationships to cultivate a climate of cultural density. Many people turned their sights to the city as a source of inspiration: examples include the novelist Narcís Oller, who in La febre d'or created a vast naturalistic portrait of life in Barcelona; Frederic Soler 'Pitarra', who brought urban costumbrism to his theatre; and Jacint Verdaguer, whose work Oda a Barcelona ushered in a lyrical genre devoted to the city. Leaflets were also popular: continuing with the model of Eugenio Sue, in 1860 Antonio Altadill published Los misterios de Barcelona to huge success, a book featuring a sort of Count of Montecristo from La Font d’en Fargas. Thus was literary Barcelona forged in the 19th century, the contemporary of Dickens' London and Pérez Galdós' Madrid.
Nor should we forget that Catholic doctrine continued to be extraordinarily influential: almost 400,000 copies of a book like Camí dret i segur per arribar al cel, published in both Catalan and Spanish by the Claretians' Llibreria Religiosa, were distributed.

The 20th century

In the first third of the 20th century, Barcelona was a city that was modernising rapidly, seeking to emulate the great European metropolises. Institutions such as the Institute of Catalan Studies and the Biblioteca de Catalunya were founded under the banner of Catalanism and ensconced books as the cornerstone of social life. Booksellers' activity was brisk: in his old age, Antoni Palau counted more than 50 bookshops in 1933 in the city.
They were the years of ambitious projects: the Espasa publishing house launched its Encyclopaedia, following the major referents in Germany; it ended up totalling 82 volumes with 1,500 pages each, weighing more than 164 kilos and measuring six linear metres. It encompassed nine million articles and 46,000 biographies. The first volume – “A” – appeared in 1908. The last one – appendix number 10 – was released in 1933, meaning that its publication spanned some of the most turbulent years in modern Spain.
Tellingly, Espasa, which published in Spanish, recruited prime figures in Catalanist culture from the early years of the century. Figures like Miquel dels Sants Oliver, Jordi Rubió Balaguer, Pompeu Fabra, Josep Comas Solà, Alexandre de Riquer and Ramon Casas are some of its literary and graphic contributors.
The degree of passion for the book during this period is shown by personalities from the world of bibliophilia such as Ramon Miquel i Planes, the publisher of mediaeval Catalan classics, a compiler of stories around the world of books (such as the “murderous bookseller of Barcelona”), and an activist of artistic bookbinding. There were also initiatives like the “Magazine of Books”, which the Barcino publishing house issued in the 1920s reporting on the world of Catalan and international bibliophila with a sweeping view. The magazine included everything from articles on important libraries to bibliographic views of specific topics (medical books, religious output) and even historical reflections, such as the one devoted to the relationship between the publisher Cotta and Schiller and Goethe.
Different imprints showed signs of the maturity of the Catalan-language market, including Barcino, Editorial Catalana including and Llibreria Catalònia. Edicions Proa, created in 1928, launched the A Tot Vent library, which published classic European novels (Dostoyevski, Proust) alongside young local authors (Benguerel, Rodoreda) and new international figures (Moràvia). It came to sell almost a million copies among all its titles together. The politician Francesc Cambó, in turn, gave a strong impetus to translations of great classics through the Bernat Metge Foundation.
In the realm of consumer literature, the Molino publishing house launched very popular collections of police and mystery novels. The Montseny-Mañé family, who espoused an anarchist ideology, was behind the La novela ideal collection, 600 volumes of which appeared with print runs higher than 10,000 copies.
During the reign of King Alphonse XIII, the publishers in Barcelona began to join forces, and in 1918 the city’s Chamber of the Book was created. In the course of its history, José Zendrera, the founder of the Juventud publishing house, and his colleague Gustavo Gili – two extremely important publishers in their own right – tirelessly supported a wide range of guild initiatives by pushing different governments to take protectionist measures for the industry.
Bowing to the initiative of Vicente Clavel, a Valencian publisher and journalist living in Barcelona, in 1926 the Primo de Rivera government approved the creation of a book festival, the first of which was held on the 7th of October 1930, although it was later moved to the 23rd of April, the feast day of Saint George, until the two became indistinguishable. This festival, which is popular and massively attended, still remains an expression of Barcelona’s steadfast commitment to books, a phenomenon that does not take place on this scale in any other city in the world. At the request of Catalan publishers, in November 1955 UNESCO declared the 23rd of April World Book Day.
During the years of the Republic, numerous imprints (Edicions Agora, Juvenal, Bauzá) launched a combative vein of literature from Barcelona, some of which was verging on the revolutionary. The Civil War had a destructive effect on the Catalan publishing industry – although it did not fully halt its production – as well as on the city’s intellectual fabric. By the end of the war, numerous members of the book world had coped with purges, had their activities restricted, or chosen the path of exile.

The post-war years

In the post-war dictatorship, the Catalan language was virtually pushed underground from the standpoint of creation and publishing. At the same time, numerous prominent Catalan publishers embarked upon a course that would characterise the Spanish culture of those years.
After being one of the intellectuals of Francoism who launched the magazine Destino, Josep Vergés started the Nadal Prize through the same publisher, which became quite popular. Vergés was also the mythical publisher of nothing less than the mythical complete works of his friend Josep Pla.
Josep Janés i Olivé, who had enlivened pre-war Catalonia with his Quaderns Literaris, started publishing in Spanish, specialising in British fiction. Upon his death, the José Janés publishing house was purchased by the Plaza publishing house, giving rise to Plaza & Janés, an extraordinarily important general publisher starting in the 1960s.
José Manuel Lara, an Andalusian living in Catalonia, launched his Planeta publishing house in the 1950s, with major hits such as the trilogy by José María Gironella about the Spanish Civil War and translations of bestsellers by authors like Frank Yerby and Frank G. Slaughter. They were soon joined by the famous Planeta Novel Prize, which competed (and soon surpassed in the amount of its award) the Nadal Prize from the Destino publishing house.
The Bruguera publishing house created a very popular dream factory, an entertainment industry which produced comics and cheap kiosk novels with topics such as westerns, sentimental themes (with bestsellers by Corín Tellado) and adventure novels, as well as literary adaptations and pocket versions of the classics.
Carlos Barral, at the helm of the Seix Barral publishing house, represents modernity and experimentation. He was the chief driving force behind the Spanish-language boom in the 1960s, a huge phenomenon. During the 1960s, Seix Barral bestowed prizes on novels by authors like Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and others. Some of these authors were represented by the agent Carmen Balcells. Vargas Llosa and García Márquez actually moved to Barcelona, the boom spread internationally from the capital of Catalonia and it ended up determining the city’s prestige as a publishing hub in the 20th century.
The contributions of these imprints led Barcelona to remain the capital of books in Spain, even in the midst of the Franco dictatorship. However, in the wider Spanish-speaking world it competed with Buenos Aires, which welcomed many exiles, and imprints like Losada, Sud-Americana and Emecé which disseminated countless literary works that the censors in Spain had banned at the time.
In Catalan, J. M. Cruzet and his Selecta publishing house kept alive the flames of publishing in Catalan until new imprints that captured the modernity of the moment sprang up in the 1960s, when there was a greater degree of permissiveness. One notable one was Edicions 62, whose La Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana, which began publication in 1968, is a symbol of the revival of Catalan and its cultural and economic impetus.
Throughout all the post-war years, the festival on the 23rd of April gained momentum and popularity.

Contemporary vicissitudes

The years just prior to and after the death of Franco witnessed an explosion of creativity in Barcelona. Publishing houses like Anagrama and Tusquets, which sprang from the anti-authoritarian left, gained ground by publishing countercultural works, the new journalism and anti-conventional fiction. Publishing in Catalan was also revived and soon names like Llibres del Mall, Quaderns Crema and Columna emerged. They were the years of socially-conscious bookshops which sought to disseminate a collection that provided answers to the political and social changes underway.
At the same time, Planeta began to absorb the imprints that had been its old rivals, including Seix Barral and Destino, and it carved a niche for itself as a publishing empire in a process of expansion which has led it to become the eighth largest publishing group in the world in the 21st century.
Barcelona became the field headquarters for book industry multinationals, which used it as a platform to access the entire Spanish-speaking market in Spain and Latin America. The first to arrive in the 1960s was the German publisher Bertelsmann, which had previously teamed up with the Italian publisher Mondadori and its British counterpart Penguin.
In recent decades, Barcelona has published fewer books per year than Madrid (which is now the capital of books in Spain), but its turnover is higher, which allows it to retain its leadership in the industry. New imprints like Salamandra and La Campana are contributing to keeping the innovative spirit alive. The owner of Quaderns Crema, Jaume Vallcorba, created the Spanish-language publisher Acantilado, a major cultural referent which revives the classics. Other groups like RBA and Océano have kept their base in the city.
Barcelona’s book world reveals a weakness in one area: libraries. Between 1996 and today, the number and size of its libraries has tripled, and their activities have multiplied. For the first time, a Spanish city is approaching European standards. To publicise their activities and disseminate the idea of Barcelona as a city of books and publishers, the Town Hall declared 2005 as the Year of the Book and Reading and developed a programme with more than 1,500 activities.
In October 2007, Catalan culture was the guest at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the most important annual forum which attracts book professionals from all over the world.
The Catalan publishing world would not be what it is without literary agents. The most important historical literary agent is Carmen Balcells. Today, Mercedes Casanovas, Antonia Kerrigan, Anna Soler-Pont (Pontas), Mónica Martín, Sandra Bruna, Silvia Bastos and Guillermo Schavelzon are some of her colleagues still at work. Another inevitable reference in the sector of the Master’s in Publishing offered at Pompeu Fabra University, an international degree overseen by Javier Aparicio.
Today, the Publishers’ Guild of Catalonia encompasses 279 publishing houses which issue more than 30,000 titles per year. Today the book industry is dealing with the challenges of the economic crisis, the new global market, the technological revolution and the changes in reading habits. However, with five centuries of history under its belt, it seems able to rise to these challenges.